


The cost of love

by KawaiiKitsuneGirl



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Gay, Hurt/Comfort, Love, M/M, Sad, Self Harm, Trigger Warnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-26
Updated: 2018-11-26
Packaged: 2019-08-29 14:05:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16745404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KawaiiKitsuneGirl/pseuds/KawaiiKitsuneGirl
Summary: The scars on his wrists are already old by the time he’s asked to fight Grindelwald.TW self harm





	The cost of love

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Scars We Make](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16721334) by [kandlelite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kandlelite/pseuds/kandlelite). 



> I've always felt that Albus Dumbledore truly enjoyed teaching, and this was built partially out of the strange fact that he is headmaster, where he doesn't get to teach much, and also partially from the new film (Crimes of Grindelwald) and all of the ways in which we see Albus as a man filled with regret and somehow unable to let his old love and old life go. Thanks to @killamanjaro for letting me use their story as a prompt!

The scars on his wrists are already old by the time he’s asked to fight Grindelwald.

He supposes that such questions are inevitable; after all, he may only be a defence against the dark arts teacher, but he has enough of a reputation for people at the ministry to seek him out and charge him to fight his oldest and most beloved friend.

Albus gives them all the same response. 

“I cannot,”

Cannot, he is physically incapable of it, and he knows that they all assume him to be weak because of it. He knows they think him an old fool, a title he had never expected to gain before fifty, but there’s no helping it.

He cannot fight Grindelwald. 

Albus sometimes wonders what life would be like without that Blood Pact, the one that blights and illuminates his life, and he wonders whether he could have fought Grindelwald in its absence. He knows his own faults and flaws and whilst arrogance is one, a  
tendency to get attached has fast become another. 

On good days, he curses at his younger self for being so foolish and so blind, and he teaches his students with smiles that push them forwards, on to their potential and away from the pitfalls of hubris that he was never guided from. On the bad days, he  
smiles with sorrow and catches Gellert waltzing through his mind, and locks him in there, tightly bound and unable to escape, and safe with him forever. 

His deepest secret is that he thinks he could forgive Grindelwald everything if he would only come back to him.

There’s an irony to his life; his deepest secret is his urge to forgiveness, his deepest desire is that Grindelwald could remain with him (in any way, at any cost) and his deepest fear is that he would forgive him everything.

Albus shows the students their truest fears. He shows them ways to conquer them. He stays away from the Boggart and doesn’t allow himself the indulgence of seeing his own fear.

He’s better than props, crutches, excuses. He’s an adult, capable of making his own choices, capable of seeing right from wrong and yet-

Every night, he pulls the cloth off the mirror and stares at Gellert, sometimes for hours on end. Every morning he puts it back on and swears never to remove it again.

His life is a vicious cycle of regret and momentary joy and guilt and despairing peace. Albus finds that he, who had thought himself so strong and proud, is the weakest creature he knows of, and he cannot help but hate himself for it.

He knows himself to be a truly pathetic man (and yet they look up to him, some for his manner and some for his power and some respect him and Albus hates it, hates them for thinking good of him, and hates himself some more for loathing those who only  
wish for peace).

There was never an outward sign of his flaws. Albus takes it upon himself to create one.

If he thought that he had a deeper secret, he was wrong, because his true secret is one of his own making and it’s a convoluted, twisted mess of emotions that lead him to hide the very thing that he relies on to show others his pain and inability to do what  
they want of him.

He can’t take any more of his perfectness, so he takes a knife to the smooth flesh of his arms and slices them, carelessly allowing blood to well and drip out and down and onto the dark black material of his trousers, staining them red and the sight causes  
laughter to bubble up from deep within. He gives into the emotion, letting the knife clatter to the floor and burying his head into his hands as the laughter begins to sound more like sobs, and all the while, blood runs down his pale skin and soaks into his  
sleeves, his trouser legs, his hair.

It takes far too long to pull back the fractured pieces of himself, and Albus spends a while trying to clear off the deep red stains before he gives up and pulls on his spare grey suit.

He wears it in the morning, and he is asked about it a few times, and he laughs it off with a “I felt it was time for a change,” and every time he wishes that he could be a little less good at faking laughter and telling lies.

It lets him skip more of the bad days and propels him past depressing moods into apathetic ones that can be changed into a facsimile of happiness by a student’s laughter. Life moves on and he can move on with it.

He just needs to lose his old naivety and propensity towards hope.

Albus finds that far too easy to do, and he buries all his true emotions as far away from the surface as he can until the hope has disappeared from sight and the first time he feels hope again isn’t for another thirty years. 

By then, Gellert is long gone and Grindelwald is long past saving, and nothing but sorrow fills his life. It takes him all his effort to get up some days, and he only survives on the knowledge that his students look up to him and need him to be strong. 

They are entering a period of dark times, and already he knows that they idolise him. He can’t help but encourage it.

It reminds him- once he had an idol, a boy who knew as much as he did, and more, and who didn’t let the world compromise him. A boy who spoke well, with a brilliant smile and striking eyes and a set of beliefs that he would die for. Ones that he would kill  
for.

Albus also remembers the day that his idol died, fell dead to the floor alongside a young girl with flowing blonde hair. He knows how it felt to have his curtain of ambition torn away from him and be forced to confront mismatched eyes head on, and there’s  
nothing in life he could regret more than that day, the one that took both his love and his dreams.

Grindelwald flees that day. Gellert dies. Ariana dies. Albus survives.

Surviving is what he’s best at.

Even as Grindelwald begins to make his moves, Albus hides behind his Pact as much as he can and makes only the smallest of manipulations against his old love. He regrets a lot, and when he is forced out of his position as a Defence Against the Dark Arts  
teacher, he becomes a Transfiguration teacher and is not happier, but he is more at peace.

Gellert always loved the Dark Arts. Albus became a teacher to repent for his own dealings in it, and to spite Grindelwald, and he grew to love it as well. Transferring to Transfiguration truly is a better way of atoning; what better way to sacrifice himself than by  
teaching a subject he does not love for the rest of his days (and when Dippet offers him his old job back, years later, after Grindelwald is defeated, Albus refuses. His list of sins has only grown longer). One day, he is made Headmaster, and he will accept it  
with humble thanks and a sinking sadness in his heart as he leaves behind the everyday presence of his beloved students for political choices and paperwork, and he will be thankful for anything he has.

And all the while, Albus leaves patterns of shiny white scars carved into the flesh of his body, and he hopes that it can in some way make up for all the things he and Gellert did when they were young. He hopes to reconcile himself to his weaknesses, and he  
hopes for others to see his flaws instead of his few good traits.

Ironically, Grindelwald is the one who wears the colours of the innocent. His hair and eyes and clothing all shine white, distinguished purity and wise courage that stand at odds to his dark magic and reputation. Albus himself has always favoured the dark  
colours, but it breaks him to be against Gellert in every tiny detail of life, and besides, Albus knows himself too well to be able to declare himself opposite to Grindelwald.

He puts on grey. He’s a man who falls from grace and tries to do good, but Albus’ soul will always be stained with black fingerprints.

He accepts and never forgets and allows scars to trace out patterns of forgiveness across his body. He leaves them there as reminders that he is weak, and will never be truly strong, and his hope slowly drains away with every drop of blood that falls from his  
broken skin.

It takes Newt Scamander and a Blood Pact to return it to him. 

Newt hands it over with a nervous smile and a twitch of the hands, and Albus can’t help but stare at it as it twists in the air, beautiful and deadly as the day they created it. There’s a galaxy contained within it, and he recalls in twisted amusement how powerful  
his blood (their blood) seemed back then. Back then, it caused him pain to slice across the palm of his hand and he was conscious of every drop spilt and nowadays he’s wasted litres of it.

His hand closes around it, almost of its own accord, and hides it from view. He’s glad that nobody but Newt can see him as his blue eyes well slightly with tears, ones that he forces back as much as he can and Albus knows that his weakness can only be  
revealed in private (in the end, the only person who ever saw him weak was Gellert, and look how well that turned out). Newt catches his eye awkwardly, and Albus knows that observant young Newt has definitely taken note of the sheen that must be covering  
his eyes, so he pulls his hand slowly back in and uses his other to swipe away any moisture that lingers.

As he does so, his sleeve tugs back a little, and his heart skips a beat at the thought of his scars out in the open. But nobody ever notices, so when Newt reaches out quickly and grabs his arm like Albus is one of his animals, he’s understandably panicked. He  
freezes, like some young student in danger, but all the man does is run a gentle finger over the most recent of them, raised and puckered red with healing blood. 

Albus squeezes his eyes closed tight at the caring gesture, muscles tensing uncomfortably at the expected reaction to his secret, but all Newt does is pull back his own dark sleeve and quietly provide the comfort of a friend that Albus needs.

A single tear rolls down his face, and Albus sees it drip slowly onto the silver that surrounds his Blood Pact.

“Can you break it?” Newt asks softly, voice quiet and understanding, and Albus looks him straight in the eyes and feels as hope floods back into his body.

“Maybe.”


End file.
